As I delving back into the habit of writing prose versus my habit in recent years of writing almost exclusively poetry, I’m tossing around several ideas to bounce around my largely empty cranium.
Okay, it’s more like dumping a large bucket of superballs at this time.
Or, if I’m more upfront and honest about what I’m doing, throwing the whole bunch of superballs all at once as hard as I can and see what comes out of the bouncy mess.
(more…)For those who are interested, I discovered the problem with my scheduled tasks (but not the weird refusal of Google’s search engines to crawl the site for indexing).
I’m probably going to make a hash of the explanation. That said…
(more…)There are days where I ask myself if I’m going about everything all wrong when it comes to having a web presence for my writing.
The wonder spans from formatting to content to design to SEO to paid vs free vs subscriptions vs donations… So it goes.
Even something as simple as a domain name has implications. I just discovered that a published author uses “Ravensweald” as his fantasy series collection’s series name, the series published almost at the same time that I double, triple, quadruple checked to make sure there were no apparent conflicts for the site name before acquiring the domain. So it goes.
And, I should have known that updating a plugin should have been deferred — it broke it’s own cron jobs, so I see errors and I cannot revert because they removed the old version from the plugin repository. The errors are minor and non-critical, but irritating all the same. And I guess Google decided this winter to stop indexing the site for search and yet the console tells me everything’s just ducky. No errors. Just… not indexing. So it goes.
I’m tempted to wipe everything and reload the content with a fresh install of WordPress in case there are lingering ghosts in the machine. So it goes.
Are y’all contemplating any overhauls on your sites? What are some critical key things that you wish you had done differently? Or could do? Do you think you are underpaid for your content? Or do you think there must be a non-traditional approach to deriving/providing benefit to content.
So it goes.
As I write more prose, certain questions pop up in my head about the decision making process of other writers across multiple medias.
One of the tropes that always has me scratching my head is that of most apocalyptic tropes — the limited food stores that people are going through, some of it 20-30 (or more years old). It’s as if no one survived who knew hunting/foraging techniques, or were willing to try to do either. They seem quite content on starving day to day or cracking open a dinged up, rusty can of dog food to chase away the hunger pangs. Yet, something as simple and prolific as dandelion greens seems to escape their notice. After a few months’ time, they wouldn’t even need to worry about herbicide residual on the greens (and yet, quite possibly worry about chemical residues in the dog food, curiously enough).
And I know, most people don’t consider common plants found on lawns and in the wild when they are hungry, but it always seems like a strange omission to not consider forage as a food source. If the world is irradiated, it is one thing to eliminate forage, but a zombie plague? Why aren’t they eating the edible shrooms growing in the forest behind the zombie-infested general store instead of risking their lives for 20-yo dogfood out of a can?
What do you think? Am I making too big of a deal about it and there are plenty of examples of sensible food consumption in the fictional apocalypse? If you were to be a survivor, what kinds of things you try to learn how to cultivate or forage to avoid cat food tins or dodgy baked beans in a can?
Extra think to ponder: Did you know there are no commonplace true rhymes for “orange” or “month”? Prove me wrong in the comments, if you disagree.
I am probably the only person in the world annoyed with this, but the rampant use of acronyms like O.G. (“original gangster”) for everything and anyone, and G.O.A.T. (“greatest of all time”) bugs me in ways that I can’t express.
Under current usage, someone can apply O.G. to Bob Dylan for his crossover folk/rock music. And there are bound to be people who are certain he is the G.O.A.T.
The first (O.G.) was the headscratcher when my eldest used it in reference to the post-punk band Joy Division (active 1976-1980). Having grown up in a neighborhood where O.G. meant something entirely different, I made a scrunched up face to let her know that I was almighty confused by what she had said. “Echo and the Bunnymen” was another band that she labeled O.G.
Now, I’m lame and out of touch, but I was trying to understand just how Joy Division were original gangsters… She then informs me as to the current meaning, which is applied to when what most people I know will think “old school” will work just fine. The Cure? O.G. goth? Wut?
Don’t get me started as to how silly “greatest of all time” sounds when you critically think about it. Before, now and forever? Really? Will you even remember the person you called a GOAT in three years? And yes, it is bandied about with flash-in-the-pan personalities even more than long-standing talent of all kinds.
Am I just an old fuddy-duddy? Or do you find some of these things to be just outright silly (“SIXSEVEN!”)? Are there slang quirks that bother you? Do you really hate it when I say “Groovy, man”? Do I need to get to hepcat and quit being so square?
Please note: I am not mortally offended by any these things, but they do seem quite silly and absurd in terms of slang developments over the years. Keep comments, should you have any, lighthearted and fun.
Just to follow-up on my little experiment, the results were a bust. That doesn’t disprove the idea that people can be connected by dream, it’s just that this particular case was not a mutually-shared experience.
Several salient details I wondered if I might hear about after posting:
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I have intensely vivid dreams. From what I gather from having talked to people over the years, they tend to be more vivid than many people’s dream and I am often given more agency within the dream than most people claim to have (meaning, I can make choices that change the story or nature of the dream), and I can read one to five words at a time (book titles, street names), and retain it upon waking. Reading signs and books in dream tends to be especially hard for most people (but not all people), if they even think to do it (knowing what something “says” and “reading it” are two different things in dream).
I had a series of especially vivid dreams last night and I have a little experiment I think might be interesting to try out. One of you was in one of my dreams last night. The dream space took place in an old theater and we were sitting in red, velvet-covered seats in the dark. I eventually pointed to the stage while leaning over to you and whispered, “Watch. See. This is important.”
(more…)An interesting word came my way recently (I “collect” interesting words) and, while I understood the concept outside of the actual word, I didn’t know what it was called.
That word is “aphantasia”, a condition in which a person cannot visualize mental images, and it impacts up to an estimated 5% of the population. When you say “tree” they cannot conjure up a mental image of a tree when they close their eyes.
There is actually a spectrum of how well people can mentally visualize things:
(more…)An excellent, extremely talented WordPress writer that I am honored to number as one of my good friends is encountering some major hurdles involving her health and a radical, unexpected life change, both of which are increasing the symptoms of her chronic illness due to the related stresses.
If you have a moment, please go to Jenn’s site and read about some of the details of what she is going through. I know more about the details of the unexpected life changes that she is experiencing, but it is not my place to share that information.
She could use a crowdsourced solution if one is forthcoming, so if you know anybody who could help Jenn with her growing crisis or know where she might be able to find some assistance (funding, assisted living solutions, etc.) please leave your thoughts in the comments below (comments are turned off on her post, with good reason).
Please limit suggestions below to those “outside of the box” and please don’t offer up unverified “guesses”, no matter how well-intentioned. If you have solid answers those are always appreciated. She’s already tried to seek help from the more obvious and even some of the less obvious options, and has come up largely empty-handed.
Please feel free to reblog this post if you think your audience might be able to help out Jenn. The more people who know about what she is dealing with, the more likely a solution will present itself.
Just to provide a very short update as to the situation in Minnesota, nothing has meaningful changed here on the ground with the switching of leadership (sic) personnel. The only cool-down we are witnessing is the cool-down of rhetoric from a corrupt administration realizing they made an unforced error by demonizing Alex Pretti, who was murdered in cold blood at the hands of masked thugs in flak jackets and carrying military-grade hardware for exercising TWO of his Constitutional rights (freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, the second of which, mind you he never removed from the holster and was never in his hand during the altercation). And that rhetoric is even ramping up again. Why? Because the Trump minions (and toddler in chief, Dotard Donnie, especially) are incapable of keeping their mouths shut when the best thing to do is just shut up.
Don’t believe the hype when they say that they are trying to bring down the temperature. That’s bullshit. They’re doing anything but.
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